One
Hundred Best Books

With Commentary and an Essay on Books and Reading

by

JOHN COWPER POWYS

1916

This selection of “One hundred best books” is made after a different
method and with a different purpose from the selections already in
existence. Those apparently are designed to stuff the minds of young
persons with an accumulation of “standard learning” calculated to alarm
and discourage the boldest. The following list is frankly subjective in
its choice; being indeed the selection of one individual, wandering at
large and in freedom through these “realms of gold.”

The compiler holds the view that in expressing his own predilection,
he is also supplying the need of kindred minds; minds that read purely
for the pleasure of reading, and have no sinister wish to transform
themselves by that process into what are called “cultivated persons.”
The compiler feels that any one who succeeds in reading, with reasonable
receptivity, the books in this list, must become, at the end, a person
with whom it would be a delight to share that most classic of all
pleasurable arts—the art of intelligent conversation.